Grizzly Women

With two years to go until 2012, Sarah Palin is exerting her influence on this November’s crucial midterm elections by issuing pointed endorsements, mostly via Facebook and Twitter, of candidates from California to New Hampshire. Meet the “Mama Grizzlies,” 15 women whose policy positions—and passionate pugnacity—have earned them Palin’s seal of approval.

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NIKKI HALEY

Running for governor of South Carolina.

In one of the crowning electoral achievements for the Tea Party, Nikki Haley, a 38-year-old South Carolina state representative, prevailed in a runoff to become the surprise winner of the state’s Republican gubernatorial primary. South Carolina’s first Asian-Indian elected official (she was elected to the State House of Representatives in 2004) is now poised to make history again, as the state’s first female and nonwhite governor. Newsweek has already compared Haley’s meteoric rise to Sarah Palin’s, but the sailing hasn’t been entirely smooth. Raised by Sikh parents, Haley has been forced to essentially repudiate the religion of her birth in an effort to quell anxiety among Christian voters. And then there are the sex rumors: this spring, conservative blogger Will Folks came forward alleging he’d had an affair with Haley; in response, the campaign accused Folks of having an “overactive imagination.”

In the fierce battle over illegal immigration, the border state of New Mexico is crucial territory, and Palin threw her weight behind state district attorney Susana Martinez in the race for governor. Regardless of the outcome, Martinez has already made history: she’s the first Hispanic woman in America to run as a major party’s candidate for governor. Palin also is no doubt attracted to Martinez’s beliefs in smaller government, lower taxes, and personal responsibility, which prompted Mitt Romney to endorse her as well.

As C.E.O. of eBay, Meg Whitman turned the bartering Web site into an Internet powerhouse in less than a decade, transforming herself into a billionaire in the process. In 2007, she resigned from her post and stepped into the public realm as national co-chair of Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign. Though Whitman has admitted that she has abstained from voting on “more than one occasion,” and that her voting record is “atrocious,” she has poured about $90 million of her own money in her run for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s California seat.

In 2006, former state lieutenant governor Mary Fallin became the first female member of Oklahoma’s House of Representatives since 1921. A hard-liner on immigration, Fallin supports the new Arizona immigration law, promising to “pursue immigration laws like” it for Oklahoma, and endorses efforts to erect “physical barriers like walls and fences” on the U.S.-Mexico border. Additionally, she launched the Washington Spending Watch on her Web site and proposed a bill nicknamed the “Reducing Barack Obama’s Unsustainable Deficit Act,” which seeks to rescind unobligated appropriations and repeal certain provisions in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

As Georgia’s secretary of state from 2007 to 2010, Karen Handel passed the Help America Vote Act, requiring that individuals provide documentation proving citizenship when they register to vote (a law opposed by the A.C.L.U. and the Hispanic community). Arizona governor Jan Brewer—a fierce advocate of the controversial Arizona immigration law—has endorsed Handel, stating that she “will fight to pass similar illegal immigration laws in Georgia.” Palin, for her part, called Handel “a pro-life, pro-Constitutionalist with a can-do attitude.”

Since barely winning her seat in a 2005 special election, Ohio congresswoman and staunch conservative Jean Schmidt has been holding onto it for dear life, winning by 2,800 votes in 2006 and garnering less than 50 percent of the vote in 2008. In a 2005 debate on the Iraq war, Schmidt angered Democrats when she directed a remark about how “cowards cut and run” at 38-year Marine Corps veteran John Murtha. At a Tea Party rally in 2009, Schmidt agreed with a rally member in the crowd who said that Barack Obama’s presidency is not valid according to “our Constitution,” therefore aligning herself with the birther movement.

Better known as CeCe, Cecilia Heil is no stranger to politics and the law—although she’s never held a seat as an elected government official. The daughter of a former state senator and a former judge, Heil is a practiced entertainment attorney, constitutional scholar, and small-business owner who says she wants to keep the “rogue Federal government in check.” Author of Going Rogue, Palin believes Heil offers the “business sense and constitutional understanding needed in D.C.”

Incumbent congresswoman Marsha Blackburn might be best known for grilling Al Gore on his interests in the green-energy industry. In a 2009 House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee hearing, the Republican asked the former vice president whether he supported proposed legislation because it might help him turn a personal profit. “Congresswoman, if you believe that the reason I have been working on this issue for 30 years is because of greed,” Gore famously responded, “you don’t know me.” Blackburn, who opposes abortion and raising taxes, also opposed President Barack Obama’s health-care plan, calling it “a government run, government ensured, government financed, government delivered healthcare system.” In her endorsement, Palin complimented Blackburn on her “common sense conservatism.”

Tea Party darling and Congressional incumbent Michelle Bachmann calls herself a “principled reformer.” Bachmann’s words, however, don’t always square terribly well with reality. At a recent conservative conference, Bachmann expressed her fear that America was becoming a “nation of slaves” and that the Democrats had transformed the country into a “tyranny.” After Palin, she’s the second biggest proponent of the Death Panel meme, which holds that health-care reform could empower bureaucrats to exterminate inconvenient seniors, and she’s also a sworn enemy of the gay community (not to mention openly gay Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank). Palin, meanwhile, has stated that she finds Bachmann to be a “fireball” with a “stiff spine.”

Born to a family of farmers in Washington, Cathy McMorris Rodgers got her start in politics as a citizen legislator in the capital city of Olympia, working her way up to minority leader and finally to Congress, where she is currently serving her third term as the state’s Fifth District representative. As the Republicans’ conference vice-chair, she’s the party’s fifth-highest-ranking member in the House (and highest-ranking woman). Rodgers earned Palin’s praise for her work ethic, her dedication to her family, and her “Patriot Pledge”—a 10-point agenda hinged on fiscal wellness, tax reform, and other “common sense” solutions.

Palin is convinced that “there must be something in the water” in central New York that produces “strong, independent, historic women” like Assistant State Attorney General Ann Marie Buerkle. A registered nurse and health-care attorney, Buerkle calls Obamacare “fundamentally flawed” and “an affront to our Constitution.” This Mama Grizzly has seen five of her six “cubs” leave upstate New York to pursue better economic opportunities, a family exodus she attributes to the state’s excessive energy costs and high taxes.

Before she founded the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a nonprofit anti-poverty think tank, Parker was a single welfare mother in Los Angeles, California. Like Palin, Parker vehemently opposes gay marriage, comparing the legalization of same-sex marriage in the District of Columbia to the decision to serve a drunk another glass of wine. (The analogy somehow makes sense to her supporters, evidently.) Although Parker is inexperienced in the political arena, she has written three books: Pimps, Whores, and Welfare Brats,Uncle Sam’s Plantation, and White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.

Senate majority leader Harry Reid, unpopular in his home state of Nevada, seemed dead in the water for his re-election bid in 2010—until Tea Party underdog Sharron Angle won the G.O.P. nomination. Even unusually conservative Republicans have distanced themselves from Angle, whose policy goals include eradicating the Department of Education and withdrawing the United States from the U.N. Angle also supports prohibiting abortion in cases of rape and incest, stating that victims should carry their pregnancies to term in an effort to make “a lemon situation into lemonade.” Which sounds a lot like how Angle has affected Reid’s re-election bid.

Palin trusts this former chairman and C.E.O. of Hewlett-Packard for her leadership skills and business savvy. Before rising to the top of the Fortune 500 company, Carly Fiorina put herself through Stanford University by keeping the books at a hair salon. Her interest in feminine tresses has apparently not abated since: unaware that she was miked, Fiorina was recorded on CNN-affiliated KXTV saying of rival Senator Barbara Boxer, “God—what is that hair?” In return, Boxer attacked Fiorina for owning multiple yachts.

Kelly Ayotte, who served as New Hampshire’s attorney general from 2004 until 2009, is something of a hero to Palin and her fellow pro-lifers. In 2006, when she was just 38, Ayotte successfully overturned a New Hampshire law permitting doctors to perform abortions on under-age girls who have parental consent. And her prosecution of the murder of two Dartmouth professors led the New Hampshire Union Leader to name her New Hampshire Citizen of the Year in 2008. Ayotte’s husband, Joe, is an Iraq-war veteran who currently serves in the Air National Guard. As if that weren’t enough, Palin couldn’t have missed the alliterative possibilities raised by endorsing a “Granite Grizzly.”